There’s a Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the MCA, and I plagued my art teachers to take us there for weeks. We finally got to see it yesterday!

I’ve been utterly fascinated by Yayoi Kusama for years. Well, I’m fascinated by what other people find fascinating about her. I wanted to figure out what has made her such a successful artist for all these decades. So I was really, really excited to be able to finally see her work in person – and oh my god. You really do need to see it in person. It’s an experience.

Her artwork consists mainly of patterns made of circles of various sizes drawn on large canvases and sculptures, and these can be visually pleasing, but at first sight, nothing all that special.

To understand what she MEANS, though, you have to be submerged into it. That is, you have to enter one of her installations. These consist of rooms where the door is shut behind you. It’s dark. You stand on a thin platform. there are mirrors on the ceiling, on the floor, and on the walls, giving you that kind of mirror feedback where it looks like there are infinite ‘yous’. That’s not all though – tiny colored lights also hang from the ceiling and are reflected a million times in the mirrors. Here is an example – although it cannot possibly compare to actually being inside.

It was intensely uncomfortable for me and I left the room quickly – The effect is  like sensory deprivation and self obliteration. You feel that you are infinite, and at the same time that you don’t exist. This, I imagine, is Yayoi’s experience of her life – having been raised in a severely violent  home, and spending the majority of her life living in a mental institution [where I think she still is]. To really understand what it was like to be on Yayoi’s head was a powerful experience.. but I don’t really want to do it again.

If you had a room and could use it to put other people inside your head, what would you put in the room?

xposted to http://omgjessen.com/